.5 

•L4 ft 




cHf-r^JU-yx ■ 



^CsTV 




j 



/f^o 



VJ 



Hollinger 

P H8.5 

Mill Run F3-1 955 



D 16 

The Claims 

Copy 1 

OF 

Historical Research 

IN 

London. 



BY 

A. F. POLLARD, M.A., LittD. 

Professor of English History in the University oj London and 
Fellow of All Souls' College, Oxford. 



LONDON: UNIVERSITY OF LONDON PRESS, LTD., 

1920, 



By Transfer 

AUG 21 1921 



\J 



-&\ 



v> 



LONDON AND HISTORICAL RESEARCH, 



The need of further provision for historical studies and the 
facilities for making that provision in London were indicated 
by the Minister of Education in an address delivered in May 
1919, when he recommended the University to turn its attention 
to this problem. The ultimate position of a School of History 
in London depends, indeed, upon considerations which 
intrude on the domain of a national policy of education 
which has hardly yet been broached. It is fundamentally 
a question whether each university is to pursue an independent 
policy of its own, generally seeking to cover the whole field of 
knowledge and frequently making provision tor studies 
for no better reason than that adequate provision has already 
been made elsewhere ; or whether the various universities 
are to be brought within the scope of a national policy which 
would insist upon co-ordination rather than competition 
and upon specialisation rather than reduplication. It is, 
mainly, among subjects of post-graduate research that 
Universities have to choose for the purpose of specialising 
their functions. 

Hitherto no University in the British Empire has made 
adequate progress in specialisation for the post-graduate 
study of historical, political, and legal science. The War 
has emphasised the national importance of some such develop- 
ment. It has been a matter of public comment that it was 
not found possible in this country, as it was in the United 
States of America, to improvise a Board of National Historical 
Service for the purpose of bringing to bear upon present 
problems the light of historical knowledge and experience. 
The principal reason for this defect in national organisation 
was that there are not in British Universities properly organised 
departments of History which could be converted to purposes 
of national investigation ; and all that could be done was 

JS-164 cwd 22 C P 



to make more or less haphazard application to individual 
historians and rely upon the results of their single-handed 
and unco-ordinated efforts. A remedy for this national 
defect should undoubtedly be sought as an item in national 
reconstruction, and whether it will be found depends largely 
upon the action or inaction of the University of London. 

For in this respect the University of London stands in 
a position of peculiar, not to say unique, advantage and 
responsibility. From the point of view of national equipment, 
which is the supreme consideration, it is a matter of com- 
parative indifference in what university the highest speciali- 
sation is developed in such subjects as chemistry, classics, or 
mathematics ; for these studies are not dependent for their 
material upon any particular locality. But the wealth of 
Croesus will not enable any university other than London 
to develop the highest specialisation in historical, political, 
and legal science, since the original materials for such research 
are for the most part concentrated in the Government and 
other archives of the Capital of the Empire ; they are unique, 
they cannot be reproduced, and they cannot be transported. 
If there is to be a national school of research in these branches 
of study, it cannot be established in any other university . 
This unique advantage is accompanied by another not less 
important from the point of view of finance. The materials 
for historical, political, and legal research are already provided, 
housed, and cared for at the public expense, and post-graduate 
students in these branches can pursue their researches in 
libraries and archives, and with expert assistance, maintained 
from public funds. What is needed is merely sufficient room 
and equipment to train students for their work in these 
national muniments and archives. They cannot be taught 
or trained in the British Museum, the Public Record Office, 
or the libraries of government departments, the use of which 
is restricted to those who are presumably already acquainted 
with what they want to find and how to find it. 

But, while London possesses these unrivalled opportunities 
for historical research and for the training of students for 
its pursuit, inadequate provision and organisation have 
hitherto prevented the University from utilising its advantages 
and rendering its proper service to the cause of historical 
scholarship ; and owing to this shortcoming, proposals have 
been made and are still occasionally made to meet the need by 
the establishment of ad hoc and independent schools which 



might or might not in time be attached more or less loosely 
to the University. 

The problem is not one of undergraduate education in 
history, for which admirable provision already exists , 
nor is it merely a question of providing for the higher studies 
of students who have already taken a first degree in the 
University of London. It is rather one of providing for 
post-graduate students from all over the world who require 
opportunities and training for the prosecution of original 
research, especially those who desire to elucidate the history 
of the English speaking peoples. Although the original 
sources of that history are for the most part available only 
in London, most of those students went before the War 
to Berlin or other German Universities, or to Paris. From, 
this point of view as well as from that of organisation, a 
few details about the provision for Advanced Historical 
Studies in Paris may be significant. 

Established in 1829, the Ecole des Chartes has long enjoyed 
a world-wide reputation, and its parallel institutions, the Ecole 
Pratique des Hautes Etudes and the ^cole libre des Sciences 
Politiques, have been almost as successful. But these schools 
are not strictly University institutions. The Ecole des 
Sciences Politiques is indeed a private institution, governed by 
a Committee and financed partly by benefactions and partly 
by the fees it charges ; its primary object is to train students 
for public life, particularly for a diplomatic career, and it does 
not prepare them for degrees. The Ecole des Chartes and the 
ficole des Hautes Etudes, on the other hand, are controlled 
and financed by the Minister of Public Instruction ; their 
courses are held in the buildings of the Sorbonne, but 
neither the teachers nor the students are necessaiily 
members of the University, and the institutions have 
nothing to do with University examinations or granting 
degrees. Distinct from, and independent of, those institu- 
tions is an organisation for teaching and research in the 
history of Paris, which is attached to the City library, main- 
tained by the municipality and conducted by the City Libra- 
rian. The Professors of the University itself, moreover, have 
special courses for research students. This provision in Paris, 
begun some generations ago, is obviously not the last word 
in organisation ; and in London we should no doubt prefer 
more co-ordination, a closer connection between the various 
schools and the University, particularly with respect to 



government and the granting of degrees, and an avoidance of 
the divorce between undergraduate and post-graduate 
teaching. Nevertheless, it is greatly superior to anything 
that exists in Great Britain. 

Efforts to meet the needs of research students have for 
several years been made within the University of London, 
especially by the two incorporated Colleges and by the London 
School of Economics and Political Science. But the existing 
arrangements are defective and inadequate ; and further 
development on the same disjointed lines would not only 
involve much wasteful expenditure in the reduplication of 
equipment, but would also entail an absence of that co- 
ordination which is essential in the interests of historical 
learning. 

It is hoped, for instance, to establish a Chair of Naval 
History and another of Military History ; but these are two 
aspects of the same subject, particularly so far as the British 
Empire is concerned, and nothing has hampered its under- 
standing more than the habit of treating each in isolation. 
They overlap at every point, and most of the material for 
their study would have to be duplicated, unless the research 
libraries of the two departments were in close juxtaposition 
and under a common and effective control. Similarly, a 
movement is on foot to supplement the Chair of Imperial 
History, which has just been established through the bene- 
faction of the Rhodes Trustees, with a Chair of American 
History. But down to 1783, at least, the two chairs cover 
common ground and require much the same equipment in the 
x ^ay of books and documentary material. Again the provision 
and expense would have to be duplicated if the two departments 
were kept apart. Foreign history suffers under even greater 
disabilities from division and gains still more from unity. It 
is difficult to exaggerate the academic and political disadvan- 
tages of providing for the advanced study of French History 
in one quarter of the University, German History in another, 
and Russian in a third. The spirit of a university, of scientific 
investigation, and of academic thought can be preserved only 
when such problems are treated and studied by teachers 
and pupils who meet in mutual intercourse on common ground 
and have constant access to each other's point of view and 
intellectual environment. 

The argument of independence lends especial weight to 
an appeal for British funds to endow a British university. 



London and other British universities have owed much in 
recent years to the munificence of strangers within our gates, 
and it would be ungracious not to recognise a debt which has 
not been counterbalanced by British benefactions in foreign 
universities. Yet both the wisdom and the dignity of relying 
on other nations to pay for British education may be doubted. 
There are searchings of heart in the United States over pio- 
fessorships founded by foreign governments in American 
Universities and over the influence they have exercised upon 
American thought ; and we cannot be secure against similar 
risks so long as we are content to rely on foreign endowments. 
We are not poorer than the countiies which have rendered 
this assistance ; and London in particular is not more poverty- 
stricken than Paris, Rome, or Athens. It is surely time that 
British people and British authorities should recognise the 
obligation to provide for their own university education. 

The appeal is purely one for the advancement of historical 
studies and understanding, and for such moderate endowment 
as is needed to make the provision effective. University 
chairs themselves are useless without the equipment and 
accommodation for training students. Elaborate buildings 
and laboratories are not, however, required, but simply 
accommodation for books, MSS., facsimiles, maps, and plans, 
and rooms in which the materials for historical investigation 
can be arranged according to their subject and students trained 
in the methods of using them. The exigencies of historical 
research do, moreover, demand, in the interests of teachers 
and students alike, a certain degree of co-ordination, co- 
operation, and concentration. Isolation is fatal to the com- 
parative method which is the essence of historical inquiry 
and induction ; and investigation, fails of its full fruition so 
long as the investigators into different phenomena lack a 
clearing-house for their ideas and their results. 

Contact with other teachers and with other students is 
essential both for teachers and for students, and especially for 
those students who come from other British realms and 
foreign countries. Their object in coming to London is not 
to meet only those who have come from the same intellectual 
atmosphere and are pursuing identical lines of investigation ; 
and they oannot receive a university education in nationalist 
conventicles Nor can University Professors and Readers 
fulfil a real University function unless a University organ- 
isation provides them with the means of research and the 







6 

018 485 282 2 

students to train. The appeal is not for an independent 
School to compete with existing Colleges but for means to 
co-ordinate and reinforce the present staff of University 
teachers, and provide them with the equipment and the 
opportunity for discharging those post-graduate functions for 
which their appointment implies that they are qualified. 

It is the almost universal custom for graduates of overseas, 
American, and European universities who aspire to become 
university teachers to go abroad for wider experience and 
training in the subjects they hope to teach. Before the 
War they went anywhere rather than to British Universities 
because of the lack of some such provision as that for which 
this appeal is made ; and its absence has cost the Empire 
not a little in reputation as well as in more material respects. 
The advancement of knowledge and understanding is the 
true function of universities ; and if British universities are to 
make their proper contribution to the total sum, they cannot 
afford to neglect any means of imparting to those students 
from abroad who are best qualified to appreciate it a know- 
ledge and understanding of the truth that is embedded in the 
incomparable records of the Capital of the British Empire. 

London alone can render this service to the Empire and to 
mankind, to the world of learning and to the science of 
politics. For London alone possesses the means. Its growth 
as a centre of human activity, embracing nearly two thousand 
years of history, has culminated in a pre-eminence which 
cannot be disputed. Its records are unrivalled, its opportunity 
unique, its privilege complete. It is a city set on a hill, and 
\j only the light remains for its citizens to kindle. 

A. F. POLLABD. 



